Fiona’s Reviews > 1965 The Year Modern Britain was Born > Status Update

Friends and foes alike are agreed that Roy Jenkins remains the most influential Home Secretary of the twentieth century and the chief political architect of the Britain we live in today. (Margaret Thatcher vies with Jenkins for ideological import, but she could not have risen as far as she did without the benefit of the reforms he introduced.)

Ever since the industrial revolution, Western culture had been split on what were essentially class lines. There was high art and there was popular culture, and it was as impossible to appreciate both as it was to hide your origins in declaring to which you gave your allegiance. The Beatle’s achievement was to lay waste to this tragic bifurcation,

a great auteur was possessed of such a unified vision of the world and everything in it that they were able, through force of personality and artistic focus, to be in sole creative charge of the set of sub-creators – actors, lighting crews, set designers etc – working for them. That the work of a great auteur could, like the work of a great novelist or painter, become the expression of a single spirit.

Heath wasn’t, as is often suggested, the first non-aristocrat to lead the party. But as an ex-grammar-school boy he was certainly the first man of lower-middle-class origins to head the party of nobility. Nor was he the last. For fully forty years after Heath’s accession, the Conservatives were led by men – and a woman – with backgrounds which would have been unthinkable to earlier versions of the party

economic logistics underlay the form of Dylan’s early work. Like an artist who makes his name with charcoal drawings because he can’t afford to experiment with oils, Dylan had become a folk singer because folk songs were cheaper to perform than rock and roll songs. The folk tradition of one man and his guitar meant that you could put on a show with the minimum of assistance. ‘It was easy,’ Dylan explained

there can be no doubt that the Conservative Party regarded cars not only as emblems of freedom but as a highly practical means of avoiding the great unwashed. As late as the turn of the millennium, an early Tory hopeful for the London mayoralty, Steve Norris, was to be found delivering himself of the opinion that the problem with public transport wasn’t the transport but the public.

The car has a profound effect upon personality. . . being sealed off in a speeding glass and steel box, a box increasingly filled with the sounds of one’s own choosing, blunts you to the lives and needs of others. Cars dehumanise their drivers – and in doing so they render everyone outside their driver’s domain less than human too. The car alienates us not just from ourselves, nor just from our fellow man

Throughout its first years in office, Wilson's government was pressing ahead with plans to establish a new town at Milton Keynes in north Buckinghamshire. It was there that one of Wilson's greatest achievements, the Open University, was established. One of the reasons the town was selected was that it lay equidistant between the cities of London, Birmingham, Oxford and Cambridge

From the start, though, Plath’s relationship with Hughes had been marked out by its own violence. In ‘Daddy’ which was written almost seven years to the day after her first meeting with Hughes at a party in Cambridge, Plath talks of a vampire having drunk her blood for just that length of time. Still the fact remains that Plath had fangs of her own and enjoyed using them.

As a role model for those who had seen through the feminine mystique, this suicidal neurotic who in ‘Daddy’ openly acknowledged her unresolved Electra complex was hardly ideal. In fact, Plath’s father had died two decades and more earlier, when she was just eight, . . . there is something to be said for the idea that the furiously competitive Plath devoted the rest of her life to trying to get her father back.